In a communication network, it can helpful to determine the network capacity that is available for a new channel. For example, in a small home network, a number of devices (e.g., servers, desktop computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)) may be connected using a variety of OSI Communications Model Layer 2 technologies. In addition, various combinations of switches, hubs, wireless access points, and wireless bridges, etc. may be employed in the network configuration.
Measuring network characteristics in such networks may be important for applications and services such as streaming multimedia data across the network. For example, with knowledge of the sustainable capacity between two nodes in the network, a user's multimedia application can determine whether and at what data rate to safely start a new multimedia stream.
However, existing approaches for determining available capacity generally require distributed intelligence in the network (e.g., detection of packet loss or management of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) marks). Furthermore, some such approaches are designed to operate only on wide area networks, failing to adequately support small network.